 All right, I think it's about time to begin. Welcome to the closing plenary session for our spring 2023 member meeting. I hope that you have had a good day and a half here and have had an opportunity to catch up with old colleagues, meet new colleagues, learn some interesting things, trade ideas. In a moment, I'm going to turn it over for our final session, but before doing that, I just want to take a couple of minutes to thank some folks. We've had just an extraordinary set of plenary and breakout sessions at this meeting, at least that's sure how it felt to me from the ones I had an opportunity to engage in. And I'd like to ask you to join me in thanking all of our presenters including, I just want to note, the conveners for the breakfast topical roundtable discussions, an innovation that we tried out for the first time at this meeting and based on the comments I've been hearing. I think you can expect to see again at our December meeting. So please join me in thanking all of our presenters and conveners. I want to also just say a big thank you to the CNI staff and the AV team. They make it look easy. It's not. It just looks like it happens by magic and I am always enormously grateful to them for how smoothly they make all of this work. Please join me in thanking them. And now let me get on to the main reason we're here this afternoon and the closing session is going to be a panel on the American Council of Learning Society, of Learned Societies, Commission on Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship. That's quite a mouthful. I just want to draw a couple of lines from one place to another. This commission actually is very much along a line of inquiry that goes back to the early days of CNI. Our concern with how scholarship is sustained, how it is preserved, how it is brought forward, how it survives transitions in technology and scholarly practice. This is something that our community has been concerned with for literally decades. We've also been really concerned with the kind of infrastructure in the broadest sense of social as well as technical infrastructure to make these things happen. You'll recall back not long after the turn of the century, the Atkins Report, the commission on cyber infrastructure in science and engineering, chaired by Paul and Peter's award winner, Dan Atkins. That gave rise to a complimentary report a few years later called Our Cultural Commonwealth, which was prepared by a commission, again, assembled under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies and chaired by John Unsworth, who's been a member of our community for a very long time. Today we are going to hear about the thinking, the conversations, the forming recommendations of a commission that has been working, I guess for about two or two and a half years now, that was established by the ACLS, funded by the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. And really looking at how we foster and sustain diverse digital scholarship as we look at this sort of, you know, explosion of diverse inquiry based on digital tools and digital data and using the digital media to communicate their insights. There are many people involved in this commission and we have links on the webpage and in the program to the commission. We unfortunately couldn't figure out how to have a conversation among 15 or so commissioners. So we picked out a few. We picked out voices that were perhaps less familiar to the CNI community than a few of the other commissioners who regularly join us at CNI. And also we were looking for a set of voices that really can bridge the scholarship issues as well as the infrastructure issues and that allow the needs of the scholarship to kind of drive the thinking about sustainability and infrastructure. Some of you may have seen Marissa Parnham's presentation when the commission was launched. That took place when we were all virtual during the early pandemic. But the commission's at least as far as I can tell been kind of quiet since then. So I think this, I hope this will be a unique opportunity to begin to gain insight into where their deliberations have taken them. With that, I am going to turn it over to James Shulman, who is the Chief Operating Officer and Vice President at the American Council of Learned Societies. He will moderate the panel and introduce the panelists. And before handing over to him, I just want to take a moment to express my thanks to him. He has been just a wonderful, wonderful partner in putting this session together with me. And I can't thank him enough. James, over to you. Great. Thank you, Clifford. And thanks to all of you who are here with us today. We're going to hopefully keep this lively. We have some of the more fun and brilliant people that you will meet here with me. And so we're going to have a conversation. The report is not done. So if anyone thinks they've missed it, you have not. There's much left to do. It's a huge and fascinating set of social, technical questions and problems. We've been holding focus groups for the last month or two. I think 22 of them, four with librarians in our office, three with publishers and platforms, one with history department chairs, one with English department chairs, one with clear fellows, more, lots more. And part of that really is both to test the thinking of that the commission has been going through and how to sort of bring together and synthesize all the issues and possibilities involved. And also, part of it has been to build out the networks that will continue to support this work both near term and long term, and guess what? You all are now a big focus group. So we're going to have plenty of time for questions and we can handle anything. I'm not sure we can answer it, but we can handle anything. So as Clifford said, I mean when he talked about the sort of social part of the social, technical work involved in all of your lives, one of the things that is going to come out of this report is not just a report, but some work on the networks that are in place, the networks that are not in place, the networks that need to be bolstered, and I think most importantly, the networks that need to collide. Ben Vincent, who's a provost at Case Western and on the commission when we were having a discussion with him at one point said, I talk to provost all the time. He said, but you know when you talk about ACLS and committees of department chairs, I don't ever talk to department chairs, and I certainly, I mean I talk to department chairs, but I don't talk to a committee of department chairs. When Charles Watkinson who's on the commission and who's serving this year as president of the Association of University Presses, we were talking about some of these issues. We brought Charles to talk with a set of university deans of humanities that we meet with regularly at ACLS. Well they were thrilled because they were trying to figure out book issues and publishing issues on their own, but they're university deans. They do a lot of other things. So it's those collisions of networks that will be, that won't be just part of the report. That will be part of the product of what this commission's doing. A few quick thank yous. One is to Patricia Sway and Don Waters who started this work a couple of years ago when Don was still at Mellon worrying about the well-being and sustainability of projects that they'd funded, resources they'd helped support, and then Brett Bobly at NEH the same way. Carol Mandel, many of you know well, is really leading a research team that's supporting the work of this commission and she's failing retirement entirely because she's working really hard on this, which is great. Three other people working on that team are Katrina Fenland at the High School at the University of Maryland. Zoe LeBlanc at the High School at University of Illinois and my colleague, Keanu Nurse at ACLS. So that's the team working on this. The timing is that the work will appear this year. These are busy folks, we have to let them go. They can't work forever, but they're, so we're gonna, but exact timing of that is not done and there's gonna be some vetting of it with lots of you and we hope that we can call upon you. So let me start by asking, and just in the order that we're sitting with Meredith and Maria and Mariamma, just to give a sense of a project that they've worked on that brings them to this commission and to this audience. So I'll start with you, Meredith. Oh, good afternoon, I'm Meredith Evans. I am the director of the Carter Presidential Library, but today I just get to be Meredith so I don't represent the government, so please don't think I do. I'm also an archivist by trade, that's my heart, that's my love and serving on this commission has been fantastic because it's really reinvigorated a few of my passion projects that I still pay attention to and help with as much as I can. When I was at Wash U way back in 2014, somewhere around there, Ferguson had just happened, Michael Brown was killed and we started an open access archive documenting the protests and we created an OMECA instance on the fly and we asked people to just upload photos or whatever they wanted while they were out protesting. We didn't take names, we didn't take information, we were starting to build a community archive digitally. We only requested an email address so in case we saw something that we thought shouldn't, wasn't appropriate, then we would email you and let you know and you would either take it down or we would remove it. That project escalated into a lot of different things. It still exists today. If you are from the library world or archival world, the metadata is not wonderful but it is searchable but it was also used by the police unbeknownst to us throughout the years to identify people who were protesting to serve them and do all types of other things that law enforcement do. So while at Wash U, Burgess Jules, a good colleague, he's now working for Shift Design and I were talking and discussing what were next steps and we approached Don Waters, his name might come up quite a bit, while he was at Mellon to think about building tools to use for using Twitter as an actual research data from Twitter in an ethical way and one that protected the activists that were utilizing it to organize and to meet and to provide instructions and DocNOW still exists today and there are four tools that work that DocNOW produced that basically allows you to use AI and look through Twitter feeds and collect that data in mass ways but also reminds you about the ethical things to do with that. There's a community that you're taking from to publish work and so we want people to understand when you look at that product and all the tools that exist that there's an ethics that you need to uphold with that. You're not just using the tweet for your research, you're actually taking something that somebody said in an instance, may or may not believe 10 years from now and we want to make sure that we are helping people see from an archival perspective that yes, this is valuable data that we want to keep forever and be able to reflect on later but we also want to make sure that we are doing right by the people who've tweeted or used any kind of social media at that time whether it's to organize or express themselves, whatever they may look like. So part of DocNOW also came out of that was organizing activists and helping them build community archives on their own from a digital perspective and so that continues as well. So I am a formal archivist so to speak but I think it's important for people to save and speak for themselves and these are repositories that can be used for educational purposes at any point in conversation with that community archivist or with that activist or with the group that's collecting. So that's a brief summary of what I'm working on. Great, and we'll turn to Maria and I will give you the out that Maria said can I use my slides and I said no slides. So we're just doing a discussion but Maria if you start waving your hands do we know that you're pointing to slides in your head? I'm very slide dependent because I'm an associate professor and this is the air we breathe, the water we swim in. So my name is Maria Coteta, I'm an associate professor in Mexican American and Latino studies at the University of Texas. I was at the University of Michigan until around 2020 I moved in the COVID times to a place that is not the easiest place to do ethnic studies or women's studies in. So I'm here to, I'll say a few words about a project that I've been working on in collaboration with Dr. Linda Garcia Merchant since 2009. And I should say, I wanna begin by saying that giving you a sort of deeper history, my mother was a radical librarian and archivist in the 1970s and very invested in the power of information, the transformational power of information. So I think that is where I come by our approach to this project. So in a nutshell, Chicana Por Miraza is a digital archive. It currently contains around 20,000 digital assets including oral histories. As I said, it was started in 2009. Infrastructurally, where does it live? So it lives on a server, a machine at the Texas Advanced Computing Cluster. As I said, it's 20,000 digital assets. So it's about three or four terabytes of space. And we also have, and that is a log in protected, it's on a log in protected data management system. We use a system called Clouder which was developed for the sciences and data sharing in the sciences. We also have a public website. Chicana Por Miraza and that includes timelines, biographies, short historical essays, all of which are written by students, mostly undergraduates who work on the project. Although they are also vetted, especially the bios by the women whose oral histories we collect. So that's an important part and it also touches on some of the ethics that were just mentioned, right? And we can talk about that in a bit. I do wanna give a little backstory to the project because it's important to understand why the project functions in the way it does. We started the project in 2009 and when we started the project, Linda Garcia Merchant was actually in the private sector. She was a filmmaker in Chicago. She had made a documentary about her mother and my mother and a network of women, Chicanas, Latinas who were involved in the National Women's Political Caucus. She and I came together because we saw this history nowhere. We saw Chicanas and Latinas, absolutely, well we didn't see them. What we saw was an absence, right? And I understood pretty early on because my mother was an archivist at the Benson Latin American Collection for about two decades, you know, that this was because of an archival feedback loop, right? Which is to say that archives weren't being collected from these women. Therefore historians were not writing or scholars weren't writing histories or monographs that included them. Therefore archivists, you know, they didn't see what they didn't see, right? You don't know what you don't know. And so they weren't being, this continuous feedback loop, you know, this absent presence is what I call it. And so Linda and I, both of whom had mothers who were very active in social movements in the 1970s, decided that what we had to do was intervene and create our own archive. In that way it's not actually that different from what Meredith has described, right? In that it's focused on activism. It's focused on individuals who have very complex relationships with institutions like libraries, universities and the police and the state. And so, you know, we had to sort of imagine and conceive of our archive in a different way than, you know, might be typical for an archive in an institution. It is a post-custodial archive. And basically our methodology is usually we travel to women, to their homes. We conduct oral histories usually with two or three students in tow. Sometimes my mother comes along for fun and because she knows many of them. And we scan archives. We scan anywhere from in a single visit. We might scan, you know, anywhere from 20 to 2000. We scan 2000 photographs of, by photographer, Nancy de Los Santos when we visited LA. And so, you know, this is very bootstrapped from all the way from like, you know, the imperative to our, you know, ethical modalities of approaching women and managing the assets that we collect from them, ensuring them access to those assets, ensuring that they maintain access to them, ensuring that they maintain copyright. That's incredibly important, right? So we have the rights to use these materials for educational purposes, but we also have to be very careful about making sure that they have the right to both access them and determine what happens to them. If someone's going to publish them, we, photographs, for example, will connect them to the donor. The other important part of our project is that it is an archive that is not extractive, right? It is not a resource in the typical sense that we might imagine archives. It is, in fact, we imagine it as a collective. So all of the people that are working on the archive, the donors, the students, the partnerships that we create in other places that are doing projects that have the same scope, those people, those individuals or members of the collective, they have access to the archive, but the general public does not. So that raises a whole question about open access, which is almost always seen as an indisputable good or universal good, but it's not always the case that it is, and for different communities that might mean different things, right? They might not be willing to have open access. I think those are some of the issues that I think are important to our practice. I also wanna say that I appreciate Meredith's mentioning of the ethical imperatives that are at the center of their practice, their digital practice, because we have actually a list of 10 sort of protocols for how we conduct our work that are very different from the typical, from what might be the protocols of the IRB or other kinds of protocols, right? So they're very distinct to our work and happy to talk more about that later. Thank you. Hello, everybody, and I'm joining my colleagues here with great excitement. I've tried to meet as many of you as possible on this my first visit to CNI, but I just want to thank you for welcoming us and allowing this forum so that, which I think is essential to continuing before we finish the report. I think that the dialogue's gonna be really important. So I'm Mary Emma Graham. I am the founding director of the History of Black Writing. That name, of course, has evolved, and I will give you, I don't usually do this. I'll tell you what the very first name was, but it was such a horrible, clunky title. I was advised to change it. It was the Computer Assisted Analysis of Black Literature. But when we had an acronym, it was Cable. So, but those who were joining with me felt it was just not going to work, but this is 1983. Wow. So we turned 40 this year. It was, and I had gone to school in the theory era. I had gone to graduate school and I kept saying to myself, what are we gonna do with all this theory? We don't know the text that the theory is based on. We were doing recovery work, which is how I entered, you know, content, collecting content and building collections. But it was clear to me that we didn't have the basis for some of the theories that I was being forced to consider. And I felt that if I were going to at least participate in that conversation, I needed to have my facts straight. I needed to have data. So the idea in the 80s, the idea of having more data meant that you had to do collection development. You had to recover work. And this was a big, as you know, a big era for recovery. And so, graduate school for me was really trying to hone in on some skills, including the skills of a librarian, which is where my GRA ships are often based, so that we could really have the basis for doing ongoing work. So the history of black writing started in 83. It is now, today, as I say, it is now 40 years old. Now, I'm sitting here. My gray hair shows every year of that era and that period. But from the very beginning, it was clear to me, too, that we would have to rely on students to do the work. We would have to collaborate with other people because there was no infrastructure, so to speak of. Nobody had considered having an entire project devoted to just recovering a body of literature and then trying to preserve it and make it accessible to others. And that was a very fairly simple mission at the time. Recover, preserve. But we were in the era of increased use of technology for any kind of humanities-based research. So I was around people who were doing that kind of work and I simply asked, what if? So I'm talking to computer scientists and I still do and I know less now than I did then and I'd still use the same approach. I say, this is what I need. This is what I want. Can you do it? Can you do it? In the morning, we have something that we can work on. So that back-end work was always based on working with somebody else. So the collaboration was there from the very beginning. Once we found about 1,000 titles and we did enter them into a computer bibliography, a computerized bibliography today. We call it a database. And we started with about 1,500 titles that we were recovering. We found most of these, I must say, were titles that were not known, were not being taught or actively discussed. Almost no criticism or critical reception had been applied to them. Today, what we call the HBW corpus is more than 7,000 titles. Most of those are titles that we have recovered, that is, again, little known, understudied, under read. So that collection development ultimately became essential for preservation and the way to do it, of course, as you well know, was digital methods. So we began that project early, but funding was unavailable. It was simply not feasible. The project wasn't sophisticated enough, the long list of reasons why that funding didn't come early. But when it started coming, it worked very well. But we were also very clearly aware early that if you have all this new knowledge, we are creating new content. Who's gonna create the work based on the content? Who's teaching these works? So a professional development component became very important for our work. We also discovered that that was how we could get more funding. And NEH has been a partner for us for a very long time through their division of education. But the other side of that was those people who participated in some 15 of our institutes became our expanded network at History of Black Writing. So we had a built-in system of training, teaching, instructional models that were being developed through those institutes. And with early career professionals in particular, projects that were emerging, based on all this new content from the corpus. Now, we were primarily starting to working with fiction, the novel at first, then fiction generally, we are now working on memoirs. So those sides of the work were always there. Public facing was the third piece. Again, students centered, research intensive, but public facing, we felt that accountability was essential to what we were doing. How does the public respond to all this new stuff? Is it just for scholars only? So those three pillars, so to speak, the student-centered nature of the work, relying on the staff because we didn't have support to pay people to do that kind of work, but then making sure that we would continue to build the database itself, but also having users, the language of today, the user experience, who are our publics? Who are our various publics? And we started with things that were fairly simple. I was at the University of Mississippi at the time. We decided to bring Richard Wright back to Mississippi, which was a pretty bold thing to do in 1985. And we did. International scholars, an international conference who had been studying Richard Wright, who brought him home to Mississippi. And that was the kind of sort of public facing model because it was not an academic exclusive conference. It was a conference open to teachers who wanted to bring their classes. Community people who knew Wright was from Mississippi, but they never knew much about him because his books were banned in Mississippi. So we were obviously violating laws at the same time. So the public facing component was something we were fairly good, got very good at the beginning. Now by 2010, after a series of professional development institutes worked again, expanding in terms of the collection development, we recognized that the digital era was passing us by. So we launched whole hog into a new project, which is the one that I think brought me to the commission. And it's the Black Book Interactive Project. Note that it does not have digital in the title. And that was because early on, we were encountering people who did not see this as something akin to their interests or useful in any way that was resistance. And we felt that the broadest base we could create would be to explain to people that literature interacts with lots of different things. Technology is one of those things. So the Black Book Interactive Project was a bit broader at the time in order to help expand that community. So BPIP is the digital component of the history of Black writing. And it does include the HBW corpus that continues to expand. It has a metadata schema. And because we did not have the way to access this collection, we partnered with the University of Chicago at first before we were able to be in a position as we are now to work with computer science and engineering to build the platforms that we need. So for a long time, we were operating with Philologic, the interface that is still at the University of Chicago, and about half of our titles are available through that way. But BPIP quickly acknowledges that building a network, a knowledge network is absolutely essential. So that professional development side of it continued to expand. And I wanna get my numbers straight here or the staff that we now have is about 25 people will be very upset with me. But it looks like we are now in our fifth and sixth cohorts for the Black Book Interactive Project Scholars Program. We created with the help of Afro-PWW, the Illinois Eye Open Program, those partners, Hottie Trust, a lot of the training. We have three cohorts that have already since 2010, 12, who have been through an introductory program in the digital humanities. We asked the Office of Digital Humanities to consider a more advanced program, which they did. And we are now in our second digital publishing program. So many people who come through the introduction program have a project they wanna get through published, then they go into that advanced program. So we now have six cohorts that are mainly being exposed and introduced to digital methods but bringing projects with them or being exposed generally. So the resistance is not as much as it was in the beginning but we still feel that the idea of having a broad based network, public librarians, community activists, small collections that are yet made their ways into any libraries because of the extraction issue that we've already talked about here. So, but we want people to have those skills. So that Black Book Scholars, Black Book Interactive Project Scholars program is open to anyone who wants to gain the skills and develop. But what it also has are advisors. People can help you do the work and provide that work and that funding of course is all external. So in terms of our infrastructure, we rely primarily on collaborative methods until we are able to provide that kind of support. We do not get the kind of university support needless to say, but it is the project that I have been identified with and that has been the fastest growing in our HBW family. Great. So, for anyone out there who thinks that Digital Humanities work is like full of G-Wiz, three dimensional fly-throughs, everything like this. These are three extraordinary collection building efforts, and all the issues that you all know about collection building and data ethics, but all built with the steam and energy of entrepreneurs. Let me, I'm gonna do something a little risky. I'm gonna, we have about 35 minutes left. And I wanna, we're gonna cover three topics in in conversation, but also in conversation with you. So I'm gonna give you a heads up to what the roadmap is. And if you have a question in that section, we're gonna ask you to bring it up during that section because otherwise, you've all been working hard, your brains are full, and you shouldn't just sit back and relax. So you should like, so none of the, you know, sort of I'm gonna wait until the third question is asked to bring up my question. If there's something in this that you wanna ask, you're gonna have to come up and ask it, okay? So the three sections are, we're gonna talk about field building. So these are collection buildings and they're also about field building. Two, we're gonna talk about entrepreneurial risk of scholars and librarians doing this kind of work. And then three, we're gonna talk about institutional support and infrastructure support and where you found it, where the commission talks about it and where we haven't found it, where we found gaps. So those are the three topics, so get your questions ready. So I wanna start by talking about field building because I think if there's one thing that university presidents and provosts all agree on within an institution and across institutions, there's a lot of belief, and I think it's heartfelt in working to diversify the faculty, right? We disagree about a lot of things. We disagree about programs and budgets and all kinds of things. We can think of lively things. But one thing that I think colleges and universities all are pretty in line with is saying we wanna diversify our faculty. A lot of times that happens with sort of a focus like this. We wanna attract and retain diverse faculty. And yet this work that we've been talking about and the work that the commission is focused on is about all the work that happens outside of that narrow frame. Like if you wanna attract and retain faculty and maybe they're not interested in working on Wordsworth, right, because Wordsworth is wonderful but a lot of people are working on Wordsworth and a lot of archives, but sometimes people wanna work on other things. And to do that, they might have to build the resource as we've been talking about. As you've been talking about in order to do that work. And so I wanna, if you have thoughts about field building but I wanted to ask the panelists to think about what it means to build fields and to build the collections that build fields and build careers. That's such a great question. It's actually one of the reasons I left academia. No, that's a real statement because I diversified collections everywhere I worked in the academy and it took a lot of convincing of the donor. It took a lot of convincing of my employer. Yet I knew the collections were valuable and people would want to know more instead of speculating. At the same time, Doc now came along because we were going through a lot of protests and poor responses to police brutality and there were a lot of people that wanted to document that experience but academia wasn't one of them initially. It was more of how can we get information from these people and print, publish our articles with that information. It wasn't about caring for the people who wanted to be remembered or wanted this event to be remembered differently from what you saw on television. And so I think that the tools that Doc now is building not only is it tools that anybody can use in open source but it also started building communities. Community activists wanting to become archivists. Archivists wanting to help community activists without putting it behind the ivory towers necessarily or at least convincing the ivory tower how to partner with these institutions without dominating which is key. It's very difficult to accept a collection and not as an institution and not keep the rights to it. That is not something that people feel comfortable with because all our legal staff is going to say, oh no, if something happens then it's our problem. But that's the way to build community, right? The building community part is relinquishing all complete control which is a challenge in our professions. I hesitate to say this because it's gonna sound like I'm making an argument, a causal argument. But when we started in 2009, there was not a single monograph that documented the work that Chicanas, Mexican American women, did in the social movement era. Not one. The first thing we did and I think this resonates with Mariana's comments is before even starting the project, we contacted every single person we knew who was working in this space. And this was based on the my sort of bad fairy theory of scholarship and academia, which is if you don't invite all the fairies to the party, the bad fairy is gonna curse your child and on her 16th birthday, her quinceañera, she's going to turn into a frog or fall asleep in the whole palace, will fall asleep with her, right? So partially this was motivated by really wanting to bring all the scholars that we knew who we were networked with into the fold. And I should also mention that, I wanna say that Linda Garcia-Merchant, as I said, she worked in IT at an insurance company in Chicago and was a filmmaker, she was not an academic and yet she was the co-director of this project from the very beginning and that's another way in which it's not a typical sort of academic or scholarly project in that sense, right? And it's staffing of leadership, right? So this was always a partnership. Now the interesting thing about Linda is that she, I finally encouraged her to stop taking sick leave to come on trips with us, collecting trips and for her to pursue a doctorate, which she did at the University of Nebraska and in DH in the English department and she's now the data librarian for the Humanities Cluster at the University of Houston. So when we talk about field building, it's these imperceptible ways, the ways that you were talking about building a cohort, Mary Emma. You know, we also have been building cohorts. We train undergraduate students. Many of those students have gone on to go get PhDs and also to go into library science. So even though I'm not a librarian or an archivist, we've been actively training students for that pipeline and they become very interested in archives. And as I was saying, you know, when we started in 2009, there wasn't a single monograph, a member of our advisory board that we convened in 2010 for the very first time, published a book in 2011 called Chigana Power and that was the first monograph ever on Chiganas in the social movement era. We followed that up. Members of the advisory board who have been active in Chigana Power, followed that up with groundbreaking anthology of writing, scholarly writing about Chiganas in the movement era, but also writing from the women that we interviewed and who have contributed to our collection. And what I want to emphasize here is, we didn't ask them to write the testimonio or autobiography. We asked them to write critical essays on the period. And they produced some of them, including my mother, Ana Nieto Gomez, many of the women who we've interviewed co-inhabited, co-habitated, I don't know if that's none of those are words, but in our scholarly monograph, and this is the other thing I think is a strain that runs through all of our projects in that, you know, we're not necessarily respecting the kind of ivory tower divides or the rules of conduct. I mean, the important ones, yes. But, you know, that have come to construct scholarship. You know, when we came up with Chigana Power in the USA, it wasn't just about filling a gap. It was because women of color in the academy were getting sick, they were dying, they were getting, they were all seeing therapists. The academy can be a very toxic place for us. And we really thought of the project as a way to stop competing with one another in a very small field and to start building something together. This is the, I think, a building a collaboration, a different way of making knowledge with community, with each other, where we supported each other, shared data, used new technologies, right, to support each other's work and really lift each other up instead of constantly being in competition for the jobs, the book prizes, the fellowships, right? And so I think there's something in this that when we talk about field building, it's also about sustaining ourselves in a place that was never designed for us and changing the narrative in that place by creating our own archives. And yes, they're not institutionally always acknowledged or supported, but this is, for us, it's life-saving work, not just professional development. So we're talking about field building. So we gotta go back a little bit further because remember that this period of ethnic studies, black studies, women's studies was about changing fields, expanding, opening up the canon, the canon wars, all of this was part of that era. So what I saw happening, many of us, is that the ideological disputes often made it difficult to get certain kinds of work done. People wanted to build a program around this particular theoretical perspective or ideological point of view across the ethnic studies divide. Gender studies had meant much of that same kind of conflict. Programs fell apart, departments were literally at war with each other about that. So one of the things that happens when you start from this collections development side is that you cut through those kind of debates. You create the content that then lives beyond the ideological debates. But you also have a space where the pipeline enters and the field can grow and evolve, continue to divide, new fields emerge. And so the knowledge that that field has then produced has defined itself. I go back to the fact that you create content from the collections that you create, the description of those collections. So you have to have, fields are dividing all the time. Cultural anthropology, fields are constantly evolving. So, but the content there is what matters. And so for me, you have to cut through some of the difficulties that a lot of us, I mean, I experienced those. Women were not involved in the early era of black studies. So we had to have another split so that you could involve more of that content. So this is part of the way higher education evolves. Knowledge gets expanded. So I think it's a natural process. It's just that we were guiding it somewhat differently at this moment and it had to be done. Otherwise, we know that the academy is historically always behind times. It does not keep up with the times. So those of us who are out there trying to push, you know, the truck up the road up the hill have to be aware of splitting and bridging. Those two words I think are important. Splitting and bridging. And I think fields do that all the time. So, questions? Well, I'm gonna open this up to the audience but I'm gonna frame it a little bit. So I, you know, when we think about collection building as these projects have done, but also on the commission K.J. Rawson who was the creator of the Digital Transgender Archive, some of you may know. So certainly not everyone at errors in the Valley of the Shadow. I mean, these are projects that sometimes the Valley of the Shadow grew up with the University of Virginia libraries but many times without involvement in the library. You know, we have a great audience of not entirely but many librarians and people who work in libraries, archivists here. So if you have thoughts or questions about the role of the library, what it could be, what it should be in supporting projects that grow up with, I mean, obviously many of you have projects where faculty members start it with you or without you, right? Sometimes they come to you and they say, you know, I've got this hard drive and I think the database is in paradox 1994 and I forgot the password but if you could get me the content I wanna use in my class tomorrow. So, I mean, that's the worst case scenario but there's collection building of all kind going on with or without you and one of the efforts of the commission will be to say, you know, to be directing recommendations to different constituencies. Here's some recommendations directed towards department chairs. Here's some recommendations directed towards provosts. Here's some recommendations directed at AULs of technology and services. So if you have questions or thoughts for our panelists about the role of institutional support in, you know, rogue projects, projects that are built by the passion of an entrepreneur, somebody with a vision, a team, a team that scraps for money and scraps and puts together their own data ethics policies. I mean, what would you like? What would you recommend? What do you see as gaps that we should be paying attention to is on this commission? I will say this. You gotta let them sit with discomfort for a minute. You do, librarian. I know. Okay. Hi, I'm Karen Estlund. I'm she, her from Colorado State University. And I just wanted to flip your question a little bit to the points that our panelists have made about the field and what it really is. And I think one of the topics we've talked about here is transdisciplinarity. These projects have been doing transdisciplinarity since I was born. And yet we're only funding the sciences. And so I think part of what we actually need to do is look at those terms and figure out where can we model our efforts and not say, oh, this is this great new thing that's happening in this area. Well, it's really interesting to think about disciplines in the libraries versus departments, right? Like if we're gonna, if we're talking about transdisciplinarity work, I mean, the humanities evolved departments at a much slower and disciplines at much slower pace in science. Sciences create new disciplines every day. Molecular biology comes and goes astrophysics, right? I mean, these sciences create new fields based on the work that it's generating. And humanities, you know, there's still an English department, there's still a history department. I mean, when Cornell changed the name of the English department from the English department to study of literature in English, it was a big effort. You know, two years ago. So, and that to some people that might not seem like the biggest change in the world. So I think the question, I mean, I think you all in libraries, I mean, turn it back to you. I mean, are libraries the barrier to transdisciplinary work? Are collection builders? Or is it departments? And that's probably out of all of our pay grades to change that, right? So I think that we were always seeing ourselves as working against the borders of these disciplines. I don't know how we could not see that operating. The boundaries of the disciplines were often too resistant to the work we were doing. Think about when history refused to accept oral histories. And oral history became a discipline in itself, a field in itself. 911 pushed that idea of oral history forward even further. So human events also occur. But I do think the boundaries that we are accustomed to operating in are automatically violated, if I can use that word, when you are dealing with content-specific experience, when you're dealing with narratives of human beings and lived experience. You break through those boundaries. And so you're always transforming the disciplines. You're always resisting what it is you're told is the right way to see something. So I think that's an ongoing process. All the librarians I have worked with have reminded me that let's not let that disciplinary boundary hold you back. So even when we're defining genres, autobiography versus fiction, we have to be careful about that as well. So all of those systems have to shift. I mean, I think we're always boundary crossing, always in the collections developed work that we're doing, although it makes sense to systematize it just for identification purposes. I think there's another boundary that is important to note here. I mean, as a scholar, you know, as a tenure-track professor, you know, in the humanities, I think there's a strong bias in the humanities against the praxis, I would say, or the kind of work, the spade work of collection building. It's seen as the province, you know, it's very gendered, very much seen as the province of the librarian and the province of the theorist or the historian is to interpret. So like when you're someone who is trying to push at the boundaries, right, or trying to make an argument for a certain kind of praxis and one side of your work, this collection building, or even professional development or field building is seen as pragmatic and less valued, frankly, for all the metrics, right, to get advancement as a tenure-track professor. While another one is, in my opinion, overly valued, which is interpretation, you know, I mean, what do we say for dissertation writers? Like, it has to be an original contribution to the scholarship, right? And when you're someone who's working in these ways that are collaborative, collective, inside, outside of the community, you know, sort of building and interpreting at the same time, a lot of times that gets really reduced to, oh, you're just building a collection? You know, we have librarians for that, right? I mean, the dismissiveness of that ideology is really appalling, and I hate even articulating it in this space of intellectuals and scholars involved in the, you know, in communication and information, but this is one of the things that I think, even beyond transdisciplinarity, is like how we do our work. Some part of our work is more valued than another part of our work, and for that reason, as many women have experience in their personal lives, we do a double shift, right? So we're building, we're teaching, we're creating these networks where, you know, we work with networks of scholars all across the U.S., you know, we have partner projects everywhere. All of that labor is not really part of the incentive structure for tenure line faculty, right? So, sorry, I took it in a different direction. You know, what you're saying is that all the institutions have underfunded the archivists. Yeah. I mean, that's what we do. No, it's the librarians. Archivists find their original content. We provide you with the original source. That's what we do, but if there's one of us in a department, that can't be done. And I think now that we've shifted completely almost to the digital world, we all think we only need IT. You still need an archivist. You still need an archivist to identify the source to provide credentials to that source and appraise it and know that it's the right thing to do and right thing to get and why, and allow us to help you provide access to it. That's what we do. So all of our projects, if you heard, not only do we teach people to do the work, we give people tools to do the work. And do we rely on our home institutions or an academic institution for some support? Of course we do, because we can't do it by ourselves. So I think the idea of collaborating is also to ensure that the academy is stronger than it's been before because it's missing a lot of information that they'll need for future scholarship, that they need currently. And it's not all in bits and bytes, but it's also not us cleaning out addicts and basements anymore either. Right. And I mean, it's worth mentioning that the rising demographic in our higher education space is a students of color. That's just a reality. Texas is 40% Latino right now. And in the high schools, it's more like 65. So, you know, this is a reality. We need this data. So we're ready for questions. As Clem makes his way to the microphone and others too, let me just remind people of two things from the last CNI in the fall that are very much topics of conversation for the commission. So one was if anyone went to the funders panel last time, there was a lot of interest in funders at diversifying away from just supporting the usual suspects, right? From just supporting our ones. And yet, and we've found this in programs at ACLS too, that one can do outreach, but what one realizes is that the infrastructure around even grant applications, grant tracking, let alone the doing of work in various fields is underdeveloped, right? So it's not enough to just say we wanna support a diversity of institutions. The question is what sort of collective services would support that? So that's one topic. There's change within and recommendations within institutions for future work. And there's also recommendations for collective action. But let's take questions please. Yeah, so I have some questions about trust and time and how the libraries can be engaged in projects that I think really require a level of being in community, which we're hearing, building trust, doing work like you said, that goes unfunded for the first 20 years while you're doing the trust building and the relationship building necessary to get these things off the ground. So when I hear about like, how can the library be involved? So much of that is interpersonal, interrelational person-to-person work. It's not necessarily programmatic. And I think trust might even decrease the more programmatic these projects become in some ways. And so when I think about our community archiving work that we were doing at the University of Arizona and thinking about our post-custodial approaches, that's something that I think is hard to articulate, hard to value when we come to some of the assessment and sort of incentives we have around where we put our time and how we show impact and things like that. And so for me, that's a real question when we think about our libraries are resourcing and the importance of this work and the fact that it requires something that we're not necessarily incentivized to do and it requires sort of long-duration engagement that we're also, many of us kind of skip project to project or have a more of a transactional or consultational kind of mode of engagement. So that's a question, is sort of how do we balance some of those systemic or infrastructural issues of the way we're employed with what is actually required to do this work. And I think that I just sit in that tension and I don't have answers except to surface it. Partnerships are everything. Whatever collections you help build in communities goes towards your collection development competency period that they should not ever push back on that because that's what you're doing. I think it's really important to find a faculty ally and it's also important to build a student network. Students are the best. They can be a pain, but they're also the best because they'll hit the ground running and you can get them to do a lot of things that you don't have time to do and they will help build those relationships. That's the start. And then I have to say it's always good to try to get funding whether it's a small grant from the institution where you work or whether it's a community grant with a partnership with a public library or historical society, that's hard to do, but it's possible. And the relationships that you work on each year points to all the competencies in your evaluation and the expectations that your managers and people have of you. It just might not be in the exact area that they're thinking it should be, but you're still doing, that's fulfilling the competency anyway. Let's take as many questions as we can. Clem? Clem Guthrie University of Hawaii. I was struck by Maria's comment about collection building. So how do we change the narrative around collection building as a form of interpretation because the work that you're doing, it's very much interpretation. You're making the selection of who are the participants? Who are those women? What were their writings? It's not like you're picking up a front-end loader and just dumping a whole bunch of stuff in. There's a conscious interpretive piece to that narrative. Yes, thank you. I mean, I think it's true, and I would love to hear what Mariamma thinks about this too because the fact is that the recovery projects were a critically important part of the methodology and disciplinary practice of ethnic studies and women's studies at the very beginning. Why? Because there was not a corpus. I mean, and so it was seen as a theoretical and interpretive act. One of the ways that I've approached this is by writing about method a lot. And so I have three or four articles where I'm really sort of thinking about, thinking through practice, defining praxis as both a theoretical and a practical or pragmatic or applied process, but it's a sort of total process, right? So you have an idea about what should be collected and how it should be organized, but then really there's a theoretical apparatus just as you were saying that is first determining what knowledge needs to be part of the archive and also how it fits together. But yeah, I mean, I think these are really deep seated, value, you know, deep seated ideas and divisions in the value system and hierarchies of the university as a whole and doing this project has really opened my eyes to how deeply seated these values are and how problematic they are because they're also very gendered and classed in terms of the hierarchies of the institution and what is valued. So one of the things that we felt was a radical shift, Cambridge University Press approached us. When I say us, I mean the network that we had been working with at the History of Black Writing about doing a 21st century history of African American literature. And so it was a no-brainer for me. That is we had enough people who were working in special areas who had recovered enough work that we could expand the usual suspects when you do a history. And that volume was, and it started out as two volumes and then Cambridge decided their previous works in that land line didn't do very well so this was a publishing issue. Let's try to make a big one volume and that's what we did. That volume is still pretty much out there and we are getting ready to do another one just on each of the genres. That was so popular. So what that gave us an opportunity to do was to have that network, again, work on a publishing project, meeting on a regular basis. We weren't using Zoom at the time or whatever the predecessor to Zoom was, that's what we did. And some of the summer institutes that we did with NEH would forecast what we would talk about in some of that work. So we was taking stepping stones in trying to create knowledge, publish, expand the network, but doing the edited volume gave us the opportunity to debate our ideas. And one of the things that happened in that particular project is that we dismissed, approved this idea of black literature is primarily an oral literature or emerge from an oral tradition. We had people studying and talking about that in the introductory chapter lays out this idea of a written tradition as well as an oral tradition and both of them have value in terms of thinking about the literature. So the stepping stones for me were again, the network, the knowledge network, the ability for people and early career scholars or authors of these chapters so meet the requirements that are needed. And for me it was the reason that the project could continue to grow because it was adding value to other people's lives. It was utilizing the collection that we had built and it continued to grow because people would bring us things. And right now we have graduate students who are looking at African, the first generation of African women writers who are dying and who need to have this work collected, described and in a database. So that would be the way for me it becomes important to have your network involved in doing the work. Yeah. Please. Hi, I'm Todd Gropon from UCLA. Part of my program is to run this thing called the Modern Endangered Archives Program. It's a re-granting program. Sorry, can you speak a little slower and closer to the microphone? Thanks. Sorry. No problem. It feels really loud to me. Part of my program is to do this thing called the Modern Endangered Archives Program. It's a re-granting program to digitize at-risk content across the global south. We have, we put out annual calls. We've got a panel of scholars we pull from all over the country. And I just wanted to say thank you to all of you because I actually, you know, it's very inspiring to hear the work you're doing. I have a little piece of that myself. Meredith, I was a big fan of the document now, documenting now. And I just wanted to say this work is really rewarding at some of the most used digital content we collect because it's really collected to answer academic questions. So that's all. Thanks. Great. I think we have time for one more question and then we're gonna wrap up. Great, thank you. Morris Yorick, I'm from the Big Ten Academic Alliance. So just gonna follow with thought out here. So apologies if I have to roll back a couple times. But to your question of what the commission might consider for libraries and recommending that space, I think what you all are just describing really resonates with me, particularly say, we could look over 200 years of higher ed in the US and we could maybe say higher ed actually grows and thrives because of the revolutions against it. Harvard in the early 1800s was teaching a very formalized European form of knowledge and it was the explicit rebellion against that that led to the flowering of American culture. So I think this is really important is to what can we do in this space? And I think libraries are very natural allies and the ones that can work in this space, they are sort of funded to mission to support the formal curriculum and the formal scholarship. So to be able to bring light to this and to say redirect resources towards the voices of dissent, towards the forgotten voices, towards the unremembered voices because that's where life comes from, it's where renewed culture comes from and allow libraries in academia to be allies in that space. Libraries have a real identity as memory institutions as well. So to speak to that, how libraries can be in support of human memory and not just academic memory because it would be a shame if all we remembered was what the Academy blessed, for instance. I don't know how to do that, but somehow elevating that thread, so thank you. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I just wanna touch on the comment about collection building also being interpretation. That's partly why duck now exists. What we noticed was once hashtag Ferguson became like the most tweeted hashtag ever for Twitter, we initially thought we could just buy the dataset from Twitter. That's how we thought we could do it and then have people do research using the Twitter feed to explain the situation and then Twitter kept changing their policies and kept changing their policies by the time we got the grant, we realized we actually have to build tools and partly why we were doing that too is because people were using tweets and publishing them in news articles and in dissertations and in reports and not actually including the risk factors of that tweet. Do you actually know who's behind that tweet? Do you know if it's a robot, is a person, is the location accurate? Are they really speaking to what you think they're speaking to? Were all these risk factors that people weren't considering as they were publishing with one or two tweets? And so that's when we realized, okay, we really have to build more than one tool, not just for people to dissect the Twitter feed, but also to use it responsibly. And that's when we started talking about ethics, which also then led us to building a network of archivist helping activists or archivist helping community folks who were then being misinterpreted or almost assaulted for the avenues of social media that they were using to communicate with one another. So I think, yes, collection building can be interpretation and interpretation can be collection building. I think what we're advocating is that the academy support the work that we're doing in a way that's prosperous for all of us instead of us fighting them and the people we work with and everybody else. And I think that day is starting to come. It's been a long haul, but I think it's happening. I'm gonna ask Cliff to come back up and send us on our way or close the CNI session. Thank you to these. These are three of the 21 commissioners. It's a great pleasure and honor and thrill really to get to know them and their work and to stitch together very diverse points of view and some are do-it-yourself people, some are collective action people. We're looking at all parts of the digital ecosystem. To your question or your point about revolution and the role of the libraries in renovating and reviving the academy, the humanities are crying out for it. And it's not just because of the demographics that Maria talked about, but it's where the energy and passion is. And in many of these fields. And so this is work that we can all engage on. And we look forward to telling you more about the commission over the coming months. And thank you for coming today and Cliff. Thank you all. That was really extraordinary. And I think gave many of us here very different perspective on the breadth and nuance of the commission's thinking. It's really just amazing to hear all of this. And I think you will find you have many allies among the institutions and individuals represented here. I greatly regret at this point that we didn't schedule this to run more like two and a half hours, except that I'm thinking that would have been an awfully long ask for you. I know everybody's heard a lot today and has a lot to think about. I would say if you have further thoughts as you mull over what you've heard today, if you send them along to James, I'm sure he could share them with the members of the commission and that those would be appreciated. I will certainly keep our community posted as the work of the commission proceeds. And I think it's very likely you haven't heard the last of this. Please join me one more time in thanking this amazing closing panel. And with that, safe travels. I hope to see many of you at our December meeting in Washington DC. We will be doing a few things between now and then and I hope I'll see some of you there or in other venues. Safe travels and thank you so much for joining us.